Epitaphs from the Abyss vol. 1

Published by Oni Press on May 6, 2025

Older readers who were captivated by comic books in their younger years may have fond (or chilling) memories of EC Comics, particularly the Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror series. While the original comics were a bit before my time, enthusiasts of the comic book form sought them out, either as originals (if they could afford them) or in reprint editions.

In the 1950s, Tales from the Crypt and similar titles were cited by legislators and do-gooders who wanted to censor comic books because they featured gruesome horror and crime stories. Also, the artists who drew for the series tended to notice that women have breasts and shared that discovery with happy readers. (The censors’ certainty that Batman was gay and doing God-knows-what with Robin is another story. It was a dark time, as are most times in America’s history.)

Oni Press has revived the EC Comics concept with new stories that follow the tradition and artistic style of the original Tales from the Crypt. The first four issues of Epitaphs from the Abyss are collected in this volume, including reproductions of the alternative covers for each issue.

While the stories in Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were introduced by the Crypt-Keeper and the Vault-Keeper respectively, the new host (or ghouLunatic, as they were known back in the day) is the Grave-Digger, who promises that every tombstone tells a tale. My favorite stories in the volume are:

“Killer Spec,” written by J. Holtham, art by Jorge Fornes. A broke screenwriter living in LA discovers that his roommate has written a perfect script. He slashes his roommate into a bloody mess and steals his script but pays a predictable price for the crime. The pedestrian story is noteworthy for its art, which fits nicely into the gory, detailed realism of the original series.

“Senator, Senator,” written by Chris Condon, art by Peter Krause. A GOP senator who once believed in a woman’s right to control her own body is forced to change her views by grim enforcers of conservative doctrine.

“Family Values,” written by Stephanie Phillips, art by Phil Hester. A man is forced to kill one member of his family to prevent intruders from killing them all. The reason the dilemma is forced upon him sets up a neatly twisted ending.

“A Hand In It,” written by Jay Stephens, art by Leomacs. A morgue attendant plots to use a serial killer’s dead body to murder her husband until her plan backfires.

“Dead from Exposure,” written by Jay Stephens, art by David Lapham. Legends of a “bog ape” that bears a remarkable resemblance to Swamp Thing attract a man who exposes hoaxes on television. The exposure of the fake monster doesn’t go as planned.

I admired the ghoulish art in “Gray Green Memories” (story and art by Tyler Cook); the story, not so much. On the other hand, I enjoyed the vampire story told in “Blood Type” (written by Corinna Bechko) and the story of blues musician Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil in “The Crossroads Repetition” (written by Chris Condon); the art, not so much.

Other stories have interesting takes on anti-vaxxers and people who text while driving and racists who argue that hating members of other groups is natural.

The featured cover art for each of the four collected issues is sensational. The macabre art captures the horror that exuded from the EC covers of the original series. The alternate covers are an uneven mix.

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The Children of Eve by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 6, 2025

Antonio Elizalde, an antiquities dealer in Mexico, has been known to trade in treasured items that cannot be sold on the private market. With the assistance of Roland Bilas, an American, he has arranged to transport certain items that ostensibly belong to Blas Urrea, a drug lord. They are assisted in that endeavor by Wyatt Riggins, who brings the items to the East Coast of the US.

The nature of the smuggled property is a mystery during the novel’s first half, so I won’t spoil it here. I will credit John Connolly, however, for setting up a likely answer that turns out to be incorrect. I was pleased by that because the seemingly obvious answer would have taken the story in a common and uninteresting direction.

The smuggling is funded and managed by Devin Vaughn, who takes his criminal guidance from Aldo Bern, although in this case Vaughn has acted behind Bern’s back. Vaughn has experienced financial setbacks, including the loss of a large cocaine shipment to Customs agents, and his investors may be coming for him. Vaughn took a big risk by stealing from Urrea. Both Vaughn and Bern need to fear Urrea's reach if he discovers Vaughn's responsibility for his loss.

Bodies begin to collect after Urrea engages Eugene Seeley to recover the property and to take the lives of everyone who participated in stealing it. Seeley is ably assisted in that project by a woman known only as La Señora. The woman is adept with blades (she cuts out the hearts of her victims, not just because Urrea wants them but because she finds the work satisfying) but she doesn’t seem to eat or sleep or bleed.

When Riggins gets a text message that simply says “run,” he disappears, leaving behind his girlfriend without saying goodbye. The girlfriend, Zetta Nadeau, retains Charlie Parker to find Riggins.

I am not typically a fan of supernatural elements in thrillers, but I make an exception for Connolly. The creepiness factor in The Children of Eve adds chills to the thrills, and Connolly brings such elegance to his prose that I forgive him for bringing the underworld into his stories. In addition to La Señora, Parker’s dead daughter Jennifer lurks in the background. She has troubles of her own — it can’t be fun to transition between a world she no longer inhabits and a world she isn’t ready to enter — but she plays only a small role in the story. Jennifer has picked up a friend in the spirit world; it seems likely she’ll need one.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the series might be puzzled by the intrusion of the supernatural, but it doesn’t distract from a plot that rolls along as a private detective novel should. Parker searches for Riggins even after Nadeau encourages him to stop because he wants the satisfaction of solving the mystery. For his trouble, he takes a beating that ends with a hospitalization (a common fate for Parker and most other fictional PIs). But Parker isn’t a tough guy so the story isn’t riddled with fights and shootouts. His friends Louis and Angel are true tough guys, but they rarely need to be violent. A mean look from either of them will persuade most people to cooperate.

The story is self-contained. New readers can start the series with this book or almost any other without worrying that they’ve missed too much. Parker’s living daughter, his ex-wife, and his current girlfriend all make brief appearances, but Connolly gives the reader all the information they need to understand those relationships. Parker blames himself for not protecting his dead wife and daughter. That’s probably all the reader needs to know to grasp his personality. The story sets up a future installment that promises to explain why Jennifer’s ghost feels a need to watch over her father at night. While I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, Connolly has me hooked on the mystery so I’m looking forward to that revelation.

Connolly’s plots are always intelligent and his stories always move quickly, but the quality of his prose sets him apart from lesser thriller writers. My favorite sentence in the book might be Connolly’s description of a sales clerk at a weed dispensary: “His hair was bunched in an intricate topknot that would force him to censor his photos in later life so his children didn’t laugh in his face, and he wore a sparse beard that appeared to be growing back after he’d accidentally set its predecessor alight.” Wonderful sentences like that one are sufficient reason to try out a Connolly novel if you haven’t already.

RECOMMENDED

The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel

First published in Spain in 2023; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 29, 2025

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican writer best known for the novel Still Born. This is her third collection of short fiction. Most of the stories are set in Spanish-speaking countries. Characters are generally living with discontent or fear as they struggle to cope with the uncontrollable events that shape their lives and the secrets that burden their families.

My favorite entry is “Imprinting,” if only because it packs the surprise of an O. Henry story, albeit with a dark ending.  Antonia skips her college classes to accompany a friend who is visiting her sick mother in the hospital. As Antonia walks through the halls, she notices her uncle’s name on one of the doors. She has no clear memory of her uncle but knows that other family members refuse to talk about him. She drops into the room and, while growing close to him, begins to visit every day. The shocking ending allows the reader to deduce the reason why the family wants nothing to do with Frank.

A surprising revelation about family is also at the heart of “Playing with Fire.” The narrator asks herself “if I really knew these two boys who I had given birth to and raised so carefully for years.” When she goes on a camping trip with her disgruntled sons and angry husband, she learns that she doesn’t know any of them as well as she thought she did.

Another story that relies on surprise is “The Fellowship of Orphans.” An adult woman recalls her days in an orphanage, including the warnings the orphans were given about the risk of disappearing in Mexico City if they were to wander off. Walking through a park, she sees a poster with a photo of a missing man. After she spots the man, she calls the number on the poster and learns from the man’s mother that the man she saw is indeed the woman’s son. The woman says she will come to see him, but what happens next is not what the narrator expected. The story doesn’t pack the emotional punch that Nettel likely intended, but it sends a message about familial love — or the consequences of its absence.

“Life Elsewhere,” my second favorite in the collection, tells the story of a man who, after drama school, abandoned his hope for a theatrical career and settled into marriage. He disagreed with his wife about their choice of apartment — she preferred the one with better light, he liked the one in a more interesting building. His choice is rented before they can decide. He later finds that the apartment he wanted is inhabited by an actor he knew in school. Drawn to the apartment more than to his acquaintance, over the course of time and to his wife’s dismay he “began turning into just another member of the family.”

“The Pink Door” is a “be careful what you wish for” story. As is true of most such stories, it relies on something akin to magic to deliver its lesson. An aging man with a controlling wife enters what he believes to be a house of prostitution that suddenly appeared in his neighborhood. The business instead sells him sweets that change his life, making him realize that wished-for changes come with unanticipated consequences.

Three other stories are less appealing. A thousand-year-old monkey puzzle tree in a family’s yard was a source of pride until it became infected by a parasite and lost its leaves and branches. The father believed that the tree held the family together and despaired of the family’s future. “The Forest Under Earth” is built upon predictable comparisons of root systems to family connectedness, but the story goes nowhere.

“The Accidentals” compares the albatross to migrants who flee dictatorships but yearn to return home, an “accidental” being the name given to an albatross that strays from its usual migration route and ends up in an unfamiliar place, mating with an albatross it wouldn’t otherwise desire simply because it is the only available choice. Like “The Forest Under the Earth,” the author’s chosen metaphor is a bit too obvious.

“The Torpor” imagines a permanent pandemic. A couple fled from urban enforcement of social isolation restrictions to join a commune in the woods, then decided they needed the relative comfort of urban living when the woman became pregnant. The story has some imaginative touches of world building in a lasting pandemic but the woman’s vacillation between staying or leaving after returning to the city lacks an emotional punch.

Five of eight successful stories is a decent batting average for a collection. While the volume lacks a home run, it doesn’t have any strikeouts. Her sharp prose alone makes Nettel a writer worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

The Perturbation of O by Joseph G. Peterson

Published by University Of Iowa Press on April 29, 2025

This amusing novel is told almost entirely in the form of a chat between two characters. Fans of the movie My Dinner with Andre will probably enjoy The Perturbation of O for its celebration of conversation.

Gideon Anderson was an unenthused college student. A generous uncle covered his living expenses, leaving him with little incentive to make a life for himself. He lost interest in everything and responded to his disinterest by writing a book about all the reasons nothing mattered to him. “It told the brief story of my final year at the University of Chicago where I had squandered my time not participating in classes, not planning for my future, but where I had gone about squandering funds that my uncle sent me on a monthly basis, it was a memoir I had initially titled The Ark of Disquiet . . . .”

Gideon included in the manuscript “all the things that had filled me with loathing that year of my final year at the University of Chicago . . . filling it like Noah’s ark with all the creaturely memories that filled me with bile.” He printed it out and planned to “release that ark upon the waters of Lake Michigan, thereby flushing away the great turd of a manuscript.”

While waiting for appropriately stormy weather to assure that the manuscript would be washed away, Gideon attended a party where he sat next to a “Kentucky gentleman” who “had just published a book about his boyhood in Kentucky.” Gideon drunkenly told the story of his own book and of his plan to jettison the turd into Lake Michigan. The Kentucky gentleman persuaded Gideon to send it instead to his agent, who loved the book and sold it to a publisher that made it a best seller under the title Gideon’s Confession. The book spawned a Broadway musical and a movie, generating enough income to allow Gideon to continue living a comfortable life as a slacker, albeit one who was beleaguered by unwelcome fame.

The novel opens seventeen years later in a coffee shop, where Gideon is reading a manuscript written by the Kentucky gentleman’s grandson for which he agreed write a blurb. He’s spotted by Regina Blast, a woman who was the best friend of Gideon’s girlfriend when Gideon was still a student. Regina was interested in painting light. When Gideon saw her paintings, he got a boner (at least that’s how Regina recalls it). They slept together, ending Gideon’s relationship and Regina’s friendship with Gideon’s girlfriend.

Gideon wrote about Regina and her paintings in Gideon’s Confession. Regina thought his descriptions of her art were honest and perceptive, even if she didn’t appreciate his description of her body or the sexual encounter that subsequent lovers pleaded with her to reenact. The bulk of the novel consists of their conversation in the coffee shop.

Much of their discussion involves Oprah Winfrey. Oprah had Gideon on her show after he was proclaimed the King of Slack, the symbol of the Slacker Generation. Oprah later visited Regina in her studio to view the art that so enamored Gideon. The visit caused Regina to rethink her artwork after she made a sketch of Oprah. She found a perfect O in the sketch and thereafter became “primarily a painter of brushstrokes” that form Os.

Gideon and Regina trade delightfully over-the-top descriptions of Oprah. Says Gideon, “Oprah has a magnificence about her when you are with her in person that is hard to describe, and in my life I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone who was so magnificent as her.” Says Regina, “in all of my life, I have never come close to encountering a person who, like Oprah, possessed such a bottomless depth of humanity and understanding and lovingness . . . ” and on and on and on.

The conversations consist of long rambling sentences. Gideon and Regina repeatedly circle back to the same issues — Gideon’s book, Regina’s art, their sexual encounter, and lots of Oprah. The conversation would be maddening or boring if it weren’t so funny. And funny it is.

The story nevertheless raises interesting questions about the right of a memoir author to discuss intimate details of another person’s life, the nature of art, and the merits of being a slacker. Gideon’s memoir is seen by some as an anti-capitalist manifesto, but it seems clear that Gideon was simply blowing off steam. The story might therefore be seen as raising questions about how media sensations are promoted as geniuses or generational voices when, in fact, they don’t have much to say at all. Serious readers might therefore have serious conversations about The Perturbation of O, but I doubt they will have conversations as amusing as the one in which Gideon and Regina engage.

RECOMMENDED

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (graphic novel) by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, et al.

Published by ‎ Pantheon on April 8, 2025

I read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy in an earlier century. Auster’s three novellas have been adapted into three graphic novels that appear in this volume. The first, City of Glass, was first published in 1994. I believe the other two appear here for the first time. City of Glass was adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.

City of Glass follows mystery writer Daniel Quinn, who writes stories under the pseudonym William Wilson about a private detective named Max Work. When someone calls on the telephone and asks for Paul Auster, Quinn thinks the caller reached a wrong number, but on the third redial Quinn tells the caller that he is Auster. The theme of identity confusion continues when Quinn meets the caller, who introduces himself as Peter Stillman before explaining that his real name is Mr. Sad, which is also Quinn’s name. Stillman’s wife explains that Stillman had a monstrous childhood and that his father is about to be released from an asylum. They hire Quinn to protect Stillman. Later in the story, Quinn introduces himself to Stillman’s father as Peter Stillman, leading the father to believe he is talking to his son despite Quinn’s appearance because, after all, people change. Still later, after weeks of barely moving during his ongoing surveillance, Quinn feels he has become someone else.

The story follows Quinn as he follows Stillman’s father around his New York City neighborhood. Drawing the old man’s walking paths through the city, Quinn notes that the drawings spell out The Tower of Babel. The reader soon understands that the story is exploring the impact of language on identity. The old man claims to be inventing a new language by giving new words to broken objects. His attempt to discover the language of God motivated his abusive experimentation with his son. To the old man, the future of human salvation lies in becoming masters of the words we speak.

When Quinn loses track of the elder Stillman, he decides to ask Auster for help. The story moves on from there. By the end, Stillman might have lost his mind, or at least his identity (which, Auster suggests, might be the same thing).

City of Glass is my favorite of the graphic stories. Small panels — needed to leave room for narration — give the art a cramped feeling. The artistic style reminded me of Krazy Kat, but innovative drawing adds to the story. Fingerprints turn into mazes that turn into hallways. The younger Stillman’s dialog balloons seem to be coming from deep inside his body, yet his body changes from panel to panel. Sometimes he’s a ferryman, sometimes a bird, or a child, or a turd. Usually his wife is wearing a dress but sometimes she’s nude. While surveilling the elder Stillman, Quinn feels himself becoming part of the landscape; in a series of panels, he merges with the wall he's leaning against.

The narrator of the second novella, Ghosts, is a man named Blue. He is hired by White to spy on a writer named Black who spends much of his time wandering about the city. Identity confusion again becomes a theme as Blue begins to wonder whether Black and White are the same person. Blue also begins to feel that he might be the same person as Black. Much of the story takes place inside Blue’s head.

I recall Ghosts as my favorite of Auster’s trilogy but it is my least favorite adaptation as a graphic novel. Rather than following a traditional graphic format, the top half (more or less) of most pages features a drawing, following by text taken from Auster’s novel. A small percentage of the pages include traditional panels and dialog balloons. Toward the end, the pages consist almost entirely of art that relies heavily on shadow. Lorenzo Mattotti’s artistic style I can only describe as blocky. It didn’t appeal to me.

The narrator of the third novella, The Locked Room, was a childhood friend of Fanshawe. Fanshawe has gone missing. Sophie, his pregnant wife, hired Quinn, the private detective, to find Fanshawe but he failed. Assuming he is dead, Sophie follows Fanshawe’s instructions and contacts the narrator to determine whether any of the writing Fanshawe left behind is publishable. The work is quite good and the narrator arranges its publication. The narrator plans to write Fanshawe’s biography but receives a letter that purports to be from Fanshawe. After falling in love with Sophie, the narrator decides their relationship cannot go forward until he determines Fanshawe’s fate. He plays detective and this time the identity confusion is between the narrator and Fanshawe.

The Locked Room tells the most straightforward story in the trilogy, although Auster writes at the end of the novella that the three stories “are finally the same story.” Paul Karasik illustrates the story in modern graphic art fashion: sometimes using panels, sometimes surrounding panels with a larger drawing, sometimes foregoing art to make more room for the text, sometimes foregoing the text and letting the art speak for itself. The art is appealing but the lettering is rather cramped, making the story difficult to read. I nevertheless enjoyed the arrangement of words to make the shape of a person as the story begins.

Baffling as it might sometimes be, I recommend The New York Trilogy for the beauty of its language and the intriguing nature of its themes of identity and language. The graphic version adds visual interest. I’m not sure this is a good introduction to the trilogy for people who haven’t read the text version, but it is a fun way to revisit the trilogy for those who are already familiar with it.

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